So, “Nice Guys” are causing a stir on the Internet again, thanks largely to a new(ish) Tumblr blog called “Nice Guys” of Ok Cupid, which posts selected highlights from the OKCupid profiles of self-proclaimed “nice guys” who make it very clear, in their profiles and in their answers to OKCupid’s “match” questions, that they are in fact anything but nice.
Some of them are actual or potential date rapists, convinced that women that they’re “nice” to owe them sex. Others are bitter from too many rejections, and launch long tirades in their profiles about how women are bitches and whores. Still others are clueless on a more fundamental level, declaring that women have “an obligation to shave their legs” and otherwise prettify themselves for men while noting that they themselves only shower or brush their teeth occasionally.
It’s not clear how any of this is supposed to convince the women of OKCupid that these angry, ranting, hapless-yet-entitled “nice guys” are indeed as “nice” as advertised, much less convince any rational human being to have sex with them.
The site is a goldmine of unintentional self-revelation — as is a similar site with the name of, er, OKCupid Goldmine — and I’ve spent hours looking through the pictures on both sites and discussing them with friends. The only reason I haven’t linked to it in the past is that neither of them blur out the faces of the people they feature, which seems to me a pretty major invasion of privacy. (As you no doubt have noticed, I’ve taken the liberty of somewhat creeepily disguising the faces of the guys in the pics I’m posting here.) But “Nice Guys of OKCupid has been pretty widely discussed, linked to by Jezebel (1, 2) and The Guardian and even the Men’s Rights subreddit, to mention merely a few examples; Ok Cupid Goldmine is also provoking discussions. Posts on both sites regularly get dozens if not hundreds of comments and reblogs on Tumblr. The cat’s already out of the bag.
Here are a couple more of these “Nice Guys” with their faces all spiral-ized:
heathenbee, welcome!
Bah humbug to NiceGuys about fedoras, as well as everything else. Nothing can taint a hat worn by Foyle and Milner and Indiana Jones and Mr K. So there.
Speaking of tea, I was most irked but not terribly surprised when I looked around for chai at the supermarket yesterday (after the conversation here) and they only had Lipton’s, light or vanilla, in 20-bag packs. I’m not buying that much when I don’t know if I’d like it and don’t know anyone else around who does. Grrr.
Also, @Diogenes? Sorry, I also won’t be not shaving just to prove I refuse to cater to your idea of “perfect sex”, either.
*My* armpit hairs. Yeah, I’m selfish that way.
Well fuck, I drew you Asian. What color is your hair?
Thanks for the welcome!
@viscaria, yeah, I’m still in recovery lol! And is there another bee poster here? I’m still trying to keep the regulars straight.
@kitteh’sunpaidhelp, finding decent tea in grocery stores is kind of a challenge : / And Lipton’s is the dregs : P Tazo’s and Republic of Tea are usually good, but spendy. Loose teas are best if you find you actually like the stuff.
heathenbee – there are a fair few brands around for herbal teas and the like, or black tea. I drink Twining’s Orange Pekoe, but I’m a pleb, I use tea bags. 🙂 But Lipton’s … yeah, no thanks. Almost as bad as drinking International Roast coffee. I’m not familiar with Tazo’s or Republic of Tea, I don’t know if they’re sold here (I’m in Oz). What I might do is try a cup of chai at my fave cafe once they get back from holidays, and then maybe hunt out an actual tea shop if I find I like it.
“spendy” is one of my favorite words, and I never heard it until I went to Alaska. Anyone know where it’s used/comes from? Hi to all the new unlurkers!!!!
The Free Online Dictionary doesn’t seem to know where it came from other than “northwest”. Someone in the comments mentions hearing it in Oregon as a well-established word in 1980.
I thought it was a new word coined in the past few years, but I guess it’s just started to migrate.
cloudiah has inspired me to poke my head out of lurkerdom too! I posted a couple of times a couple of months ago but never really said hi first, and plus I was nervous, so I hid again.
Anyway! Hi! I have been reading the site for just under a year, I think, and I love the community here. My roommate doesn’t entirely get why when I’m having a bad day I head for manboobz first. I’ve dealt with some of the crap misogyny and rape culture dumps on people, and to read comment after comment of people calling bullpucky on the worst of it is…I think the best word is empowering.
Also I love cats. 🙂
Hi! If you love cats you will fit right in!
I’ve inspired someone, yay. Hi, AliasC! First time lurkers sometimes get lost in fast-moving threads, so we probably missed you.
Normally I just annoy people by derailing and posting videos but everyone is pretty nice to non-trolls here so they forgive me. At least that’s what I tell myself.
Hi AliasC, welcome! 🙂
cloudiah – nah, it’s just the trolls you annoy doing that! 😀
I first “heard” spendy from an online friend who’s from Calgary. I like it, it sounds less whiny than “too expensive”. I’m good with plebe-tea, though! I hope you find the tea of your dreams, Kitteh, preferably in bags.
And “Hi!” Fellow Unlurkers! What’s crazy to me about this and a few other sites on the blogroll, is I grew up during oldschool feminism, but by the time I got to college, it seemed history had moved on (in a positive way), and I used to say “I’m not a feminist, I’m a humanist.” Because, yeah, I had gotten tired of feminism being associated with Bitter Old Man-Haterz. Now, watching the way gender-politics has been going the last few years, I’m really upset that feminism has been associated with Bitter Old Man-Haterz, and I want it back, dammit! Along with my fedora!
What’s really thrown me lately was my recent relationship experience, because there was nothing in my personality that would have drawn me to the passive-aggressive misogynistic crap I’m seeing more and more of lately, yet I got sucked into it anyways. He put up a very good front of being “feminist”, and everything was couched in terms of his *personal* entitlement rather than his masculine entitlement, his *personal* victimization, rather than his masculine victimization. But when I started informing him of my boundaries, and challenging his constant controlling demands, and informing him of his abusive behavior, he claimed that I was couching everything in feminist terms, which was unfair “because he was a feminist”, and that really I was just being selfish, and that *he* was the one being abused.
Can you say Mind Fuck? Anyways, as I say I’m in recovery, and I read all your comments and those on a couple of other blogs, and go “Dammit, he did that too!! Argghhhh!!!!”
Also, if it seems I’m ignoring all the tantalizing videos you all post here, I’m not, my computer just won’t play them : P And I could use a few good kitten videos….
Gah, that really is mind fuck material! Not only a manipulative douchebag but one who liked to pretend he was a feminist. Brain bleach time.
That’s a bummer about your computer not playing the videos. Do you know why?
I fancy Reclaim the Fedora as a slogan. It goes nicely with Cushions Not Crucifixions. Kim came up with that one during a thread where religion got into it and (naturally) we had to talk about Ceiling Cat.
catechism
Catechism indeed!
Buggrit
Try again
http://i.imgur.com/sUzUW.gif
I drove my two hour commute to work and then tried to play catchup. Now I’m all caught up, but have nothing to say.
But I insist on posting because…..IDK?
I like tea and cats too! Not usually together though. My cat always sticks her face in whatever I’m drinking and gets hair in it.
OT but any ladygeeks will probably want to read this.
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2012/11/nerds-stop-hating-women-please
And the comments too, if you feel like banging your head against a wall for a while might be a fun thing to do.
(It’s probably because had-a-Star-Wars-themed-bedroom as a child me has been dealing with shit like this since I was about 8 years old that I have so little patience for some of our more whiny-entitlement-monster trolls.)
Ceiling Cat save us. Is the English language a girly thing too? Because these slimeball misogynists like the one the article’s about seem to hate it as much as they hate women.
Question for geeks: what do you think of the remark about these guys having internalised the message that geeks are miserable losers and so on? Do you think that’s likely, or that the misogynist creeps in geekdom would have been misogynist creeps anywhere – it’s not like misogyny is something alien to the rest of our cultures. Is it young (I presume) men absorbing mindless objectification of women from geekdom, or bringing it with them and having it intensified because it’s approved of by too many there? It reads like entitled young white cis men whining about being such victims, yet again, to me, but I don’t know the scene past what I’ve read about on the net.
I’ve encountered the following ideas many times – you can’t be a geek unless you look classically nerdy, having decent social skills means you’re not a geek, attractive people are by definition not geeks (and probably out to give the real geeks a swirlie), women who say they’re into geeky things are just faking it for attention.
I’ve also found that, on average (there are of course some lovely exceptions) the geek community is far more prone to misogyny than the culture as a whole. By which I mean, take people of the same age, social class, geographical point of origin, etc, and compare them, and the geeks will on average have far nastier ideas about women than the non-geeks, and a whole lot more anger towards us.
I don’t identify as a geek despite being into a lot of traditionally geeky things, particularly books. The stuff I’m talking about here is part of the reason why.